Pub Gaming – Australia’s Shame

All around Australia, pub, nightclub and RSL punters are surrounded by gaming machines. These devices provide a bit of cheap thrill in exchange for your hard earned cash. Cash that could be better spent feeding your family or saving towards the accumulation of assets.

Many of my friends are addicted to them. Night after miserable night is spent feeding coins into the machines, one after the other. Just one more crack, I feel lucky! Sometimes they have a win, but more often they go home a loser, with all their coins retained by the evil machines. Nothing to show for it – except the memory of the adrenaline coursing through their veins.

The money stolen by these machines isn’t even given back to the public, but instead the greedy corporations responsible keep the whole lot, even using it to construct sweat shops in South East Asia to build more of the insidious things. The whole dirty process is sickening.

I am talking, of course, of coin-operated pool tables. Poker machines? We don’t have those in WA. What are they like?